Witness: Cold War Classics

Whittaker Chambers (1901-1961) was a journalist and author who is primarily remembered for having testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) about underground Communist networks throughout the US.

Born Jay Vivian Chambers, he loathed his first name and replaced it with his mother’s maiden surname, Whittaker, shortly after becoming an adult. Raised on Long Island, Chambers’s father earned professional success an illustrator while also abandoning his family for long stretches. Chambers’s mother was a former actor who compensated for her disappointing marriage with a fierce love of Chambers and his brother, Richard. Not depicted in Witness is the fact that both Chambers and his father were bisexual.

Chambers was drawn to the Communist Party as a student at Columbia University in the early 1920s. He credited Richard’s youthful suicide as pushing him fully into the Party’s arms: Chambers hoped that Communism could create the kind of world that would not have pushed Richard to take his own life. By 1932, Chambers had volunteered to work as a Party courier, passing information between American informants and Soviet military intelligence. He became disillusioned with the Party as Stalin purged all perceived threats to his power. Chambers made a complete break with Communism after the Soviet government signed a non-aggression treaty with Nazi Germany in 1939.